Real reality?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liz Cheney is a hard-right, anti-abortion rights, climate change denier, who supported disgraced Presidential failure Trump over 90% of the time in voting, but . . .

     And at that point I shudder to a halt, thinking to myself that surely I cannot be about to make some sort of concession to a person whose entire set of political beliefs are anathema to me?  Surely that ‘but’ can only be a prelude to something like the apologists’ addendum to the characters of murdering dictators like, “he was good with children” or “he liked dogs” (and I make no excuses for the inclusion of the masculine pronoun as Lucretia Borgias are few and far between) Why would I bother to find an extenuating circumstance for me to express even a modicum of fellow feeling with a political monster?  But (!) we do share a common loathing: a detestation of the Traitor Trump.

     Anyway, back to ultra-right-wing Liz.  She has just lost her Republican nomination to retain her Congressional seat for the witlessly red state of Wyoming, where she has lost out to a Trump supported piece of political slime that believes (Does she? Really?) the Big Lie of electoral fraud in the last presidential election.  Cheney has been an “outspoken critic” (the phrase has been used enough to become a recognized tag for the woman herself) of the Trump Monster and has been especially effective in her membership of the committee looking into the traitorous armed insurrection and invasion of the Capitol.  And it has cost her. 

     No matter in her concession speech that she raised the political career of the Republican (“Who knew?” - Trump) President Lincoln whose way to the White House was anything but easy as a way of threatening a presidential (?) come back, she lost the Republican nomination in a state where her family is political royalty and where the democrats haven’t a hope in hell (or “Trump in 2024” as that demonic morass is known) of taking power- the last time they had the vote was almost half a century ago!

     Trump (or his supporters version of him) is living proof that the bigger the lie the more you can be believed as long as you are all-in to the palpable untruth.  Conway’s “alternative facts” are now the living truth, and reality is a pale imitation, easy to dismiss.

     We live in a world where IDS, Rees-Mogg, Davies, Lord (!) Snow, and other assorted freaks are not only taken seriously but are actually allowed near the levers of government.  Such trash rules and limits our lives.

     The equivalent of the American ‘Big Election Lie’ in Britain is of course Brexit.  To hear the proven liar Truss say that she was fundamentally “undecided” when she was an enthusiastic Remainer, and was terribly concerned about the future disruption from Brexit, but, “as it didn’t happen” (sic.) she has changed her mind.  This is ignoring the facts and reality worthy of Trump.  Just like the shallow Conservative MP for Dover who denied the long, long lines of vehicles waiting to enter Europe had anything to do with the changing of rules because of Brexit, the concept of Brexit being magic-unicorn-positive has become an article of faith for this generation of Conservatives, completely divorced from the various crises that Brexit has precipitated and exacerbated.

     So what role does what one might call ‘real’ politics – a politics that is motivated by coherent ideology that is based on statistics and a concern for the whole of society?

     Both Spain and Britain are glaringly unequal societies where the disparity between those who have the most and those who have the least is the most pronounced. 

     The powerful elite are protected by supine governments and a corrupt press.  People are used to a certain standard of living.  If I think back to my childhood in the 1950s then you can list the things that we did not have that would be regarded as part of normal life now, and the absence of those things would rightly regarded as some sort of poverty: television, telephone, automatic washing machine, microwave, fridge, freezer, the list goes on – most young people (and we older ones too) would go mad if they had to go back and live in the 1950s.  For me, simply the allowing of smoking anywhere and everywhere would be truly nauseating: on busses, trains, trolley busses (a happy Cardiff memory!) cinemas, restaurants, shops, and pubs, everywhere!

     People expect to be able to watch stuff on their televisions, to use the Internet and to use their mobile phones, to live a life surrounded by the electrical impedimenta of every day life.  This winter, unless something radical is done, people are going to experience the most dramatic diminution in their spending power for well over a generation.  They will not be happy – especially as they see the richest and most well protected in society being insulated from the hardships that they will experience.

     In 1848 (The Year of Revolutions) the one major country in Europe that did not have a revolution was Britain.  It has been argued that the ruling class made enough concessions to keep things just about from bubbling over and managed to retain their wealth while letting the vast majority of those who had been exploited to think that the concessions they had gained was enough, something they could live with.

     We are now getting to the stage where the cry of “Eat the rich!” is moving from fantasy to reality – the sort of reality where things actually happen.  When lies are tested by hunger and death, the bloody truth must prevail!

Heat and Hatred

 

 

 

It actually had the temerity to rain a few drops when I was in the swimming pool, though the weather now is not marked different from the last few days when it has been hot in a way that is not usual for this time of year.  August is traditionally a time of vague disappointment, when the weather is more variable than one remembers from previous years, ironically, even though one expects to be dissatisfied: Schrodinger’s expectations!

     At the moment we only have two fans working in the living room (out of a possible three) as a desperate attempt to mitigate the heat and since we don’t have air conditioning there is little else that we can do to make the living temperature well, liveable.

     There is something about the quality of heat this year that hasn’t been present in past years and if this is a harbinger of what we can expect as the norm for the summer in future years then we are going to have to do something different to cope with the temperatures.

     In a country that has hot and very hot summers and generally mildish winters, there is no talk of hosepipe bans and, in spite of the hot weather continuing for months, there is not talk of proclaiming a drought.  Whereas in the UK, the situation seems to have reached a crisis point.  Again.

     Trump sneered that the FBI raid on his Floridian swamp was turning the USA in to one of the “shitehole” “third world countries” that he has so often dismissed with contempt in the past as a condescending image to cover his own criminality and the eventual, glacial, movement of the institutions of justice finally catching up with him.  His images, as always, are absurd and insulting, but when I look at the situation of the UK then there appears to be an element of truth in the first world status slowly ebbing away.

     With twelve years of Tory misrule and the callous cutting of health, welfare, education and everything else the grasping Conservatives can get their dirty mitts on, the stories that one hears are more suited to a developing country than one of the richest in the world.

     The position of health services in the USA has always been something that has been beyond the comprehension of Western European nations, who generally do not regard providing health care for their citizens as being akin to rabid Communism.  Many Americans are frightened of ill health because of the financial penalties that treatment will entail.  The concept of healthcare free at the point of need is something far beyond the imagination of many American voters who see such a process as rampant Socialism and a denial of the American Way.

     In the UK, the NHS is something in which we can take a justified pride, but a Health Service that has been hollowed out by 12 years of cuts and austerity and one that has been put under almost intolerable strain by dealing with Covid is struggling to cope and, after the last 12 years of Tory Misrule who could possibly believe that the “NHS is safe in our (Tory) hands”?  Such a quotation from a past (and well hated Tory premier) seems like a sick joke.  Private healthcare is rejoicing in the boost that 12 years of Tory Misrule have given them – as well, of course as the illegal boost to their funds by the corruption of the crooked Tory crony profiteers who milked us in the procurement process geared towards Conservative chums.

     The provision of NHS dental care is a disgrace with whole swathes of the country described as “dental deserts” where 80% of dentists are no longer taking any new patients.  The stories of people travelling for hours to get to any NHS provider, is one of shame.

     Someone once told me that the worth of a country is found in the way that it treats the disadvantaged, the criminal and the sick.  If we use those criteria to judge the present state of Britain then perhaps we are nearer to a third world (in itself that is a condescending term) country than one that uses its wealthy status to ensure that there is provision for all.

     Inequality is rampant in Britain, crystalized by the grotesquery of a chancer like Johnson being (still) Prime Minister, and is unlikely to be mitigated by the lying equivocator lined up to take over, the woman who John Crace in the Guardian characterised as having grown up in “grinding middle class poverty” with her professor father and her sinkhole school only just managing to squeek her into Oxford.

     Nothing that either of the “candidates” have said to the Neanderthals that are going to elect one or other of them, show a concern for the realities of the situation that the majority of the country is experiencing and is indeed dreading in the near wintery future.  They are mired in the reality that allows such creatures as Rees-Mogg to be in government.  They, like the Republican Party in the USA are now far to the right of the general electorate, but Conservative parties are adroit in the manipulation of the processes of power, in pushing institutions to their will, of gerrymandering and obfuscating in plain sight, while their tools in the right wing press present a twisted version of reality to maintain power and wealth in the hands of the very, very, few.